The Nude Vampire Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.5

The Nude Vampire Blu-ray Movie Review

Kino and Redemption Films team up for the Cinema of Jean Rollin series.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater January 17, 2012

From Bram Stoker on, vampirism and eroticism have gone hand in hand, with the blood-sucking, hypnotizing undead serving as apt symbols of the the power of lust and seduction and the metaphysical connection between sex and death. The French have had a special fascination with this linking of sensuality and the grave--they gave us grand guignol and le petite mort, after all--and it was something of a directorial calling card for the late Jean Rollin, a gallic filmmaker known for his low-budget, nudity-strewn vampire movies. If he's known at all, that is. Even his home country, Rollins--who died in 2010--was always decidedly outside of the mainstream, and in the U.S. his films were extremely hard to come by until the advent of DVD.

He's been unjustly uncelebrated, then--a well-kept secret familiar to only the most versed gothic horror fans--but Kino-Lorber and Redemption Films aim to change that with their new Cinema of Jean Rollins series, presenting the director's macabre visions on Blu-ray, remastered in high definition for the first time. On January 24rd, the two companies will jointly release five of Rollin's early films--The Nude Vampire, The Shiver of the Vampires, The Iron Rose, Lips of Blood, and Fascination--with more to come later in the year. If the phrase "1970s vampire erotica" makes your ears perk up, your fangs shoot out, or other parts of your anatomy stand at attention, you'll most definitely want to check these out.

The first film in the series, 1970s The Nude Vampire, wasn't Rollin's first feature--that would be the riot-inducing Rape of the Vampire, which the director later denounced as the work of an amateur--but it was his first color film with his frequent collaborator, cinematographer Jean-Jacques Renon, whose lurid, dreamy lensing quickly became one of Rollin's stylistic trademarks. And Rollin is all about style. In most of his films, the mood and air of mystery take precedence over narrative substance, but this is especially so in The Nude Vampire, which gets by on a rather flimsy and not always coherent plot.

After a bizarre intro where a nude, hooded woman has her blood drawn by a team of similarly hooded scientists, the film opens at night with another woman (Caroline Cartier), in an orange, see-through chiffon robe, running through a deserted town from a group of men wearing creepy papier-mâché animal masks. These two sequences instantly set the menacing, sexualized tone and prompt the question you'll be asking for the next 80-odd minutes: What the hell is going on here? As the woman in orange is surrounded and then gunned down, the young socialite Pierre (Olivier Martin), inadvertently drawn into this chase, watches from above, just as confused as we are. He suspects his wealthy industrialist father, Georges Radamante (Maurice Lemaitre), may have something to do with the woman's apparent demise, so he crashes a party at his dad's townhouse, where he discovers a strange suicide cult playing a variation on Russian Roulette, with the winners--or losers, I guess--shooting themselves in the head, their bodies and blood offered as a sacrifice to, yes, the woman in orange, who somehow survived the shooting and is being held in captivity. As it turns out, she's a vampire of sorts--the film takes a sci-fi twist that I'll leave unspoiled for newcomers--and Pierre, smitten at first sight, makes it his mission to free her.

On a purely technical level, The Nude Vampire is sometimes comically inept, and it's clear that Rollin was 1.) still an inexperienced filmmaker, and 2.) working with an exceptionally small budget. The editing is tediously slow and choppy, the "action" scenes--like when Pierre attacks a partygoer to get his entrance ticket--are clumsily staged, and I don't think I've ever seen a film where guns look so puny and impotent. (This is a budgetary constraint, clearly, and not some intentional Freudian phallic statement.) Still, the film is sufficiently suffused with weird imagery and surrealist touches that the shortcomings in plot and production values are secondary to the experience of watching something so uniquely bizarre.

In The Nude Vampire, we get our first blood-iron taste of the thematic fetishes Rollin would spend the rest of his career pursuing. Take, for instance, his frequent use of two female characters so intertwined and codependent that they almost seem to be the same person. Here, they take the form of dead-eyed twin servant girls--played by Cathy and Pony Tricot, better known as the "Castel Twins"--who attend to Radamante's every whim while dressed in revealing uniforms that I can only describe as part Roman gladiator, part school girl, and almost entirely topless. Which bring us, of course, to the "Nude" of the title. Although Rollin did direct several explicitly pornographic films under a pseudonym to pay the bills, the bared flesh in his more reputable work--and I use the term loosely--is relatively tame, comprised mostly of drawn-out views of the female actresses' breasts. (He also has a thing for spiky nipple tassels. This is a family-friendly website, so I can't post screenshots, but you'll know what I mean when you see them.) Erotic? Sure, but never--if you'll pardon the pun--outright titillating.

The Nude Vampire isn't particularly scary either, and it's not meant to be. Rollin's films belong to le cinéma fantastique, which comes out of a long lineage of French literature that commingles horror, fantasy, and science fiction as an exercise in imagination. His movies are more haunting than terrifying, and once again, it's all about the style and mood, the baroquely gothic settings--abandoned chateaux, joyless grey stretches of beach, foggy cemeteries--and the uneasy sense of the supernatural infringing upon reality. There's a superficial similarity to the "Hammer Horror" aesthetic, but Rollin-- inspired by surrealists like Magritte--eventually goes further into dream-like, mytho-poetic territory. Eventually. Although The Nude Vampire is rough around nearly all of its edges and only half-formed compared to Rollin's later vampire films, it's certainly worth watching just to see the director find his creative footing.

The Nude Vampire Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

For a long time, Jean Rollin's films were only available in the U.S. by way of duped VHS tapes and then decent, but far from spectacular DVDs, so to see them in high definition is something of a revelation. (And a redemption, har har.) As the first film chronologically of the five being released on the 24th--and the one with the smallest budget--The Nude Vampire doesn't quite look as good as the later movies, but it's reproduced almost perfectly on Blu-ray, with a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer that's true-to-source and almost certainly the best this film has looked since its 1970 debut. As usual, Kino hasn't done any digital restoration--so you will notice some specks, light scratches, and intermittent debris--but it's clear that careful attention has been paid to the color correction process. The image is dense, with solid black levels and good contrast, and color is evenly tempered, vivid when need be--blood reds, for instance--but never overly gaudy or harsh. Clarity is also surprisingly strong. Of course, this being the sort of low-budget, seat-of-the-pants production that it is, The Nude Vampire is filled with shots that aren't quite in focus. That said, when the picture is sharp it looks fantastic. Grain is natural-looking, there are no signs of edge enhancement, and no compression issues either. If you've been following Kino's Blu-ray track record, you know exactly what to expect from the Cinema of Jean Rollin series--the best possible prints, presented with minimal digital intervention.

The Nude Vampire Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Kino has given audiences two audio options for The Nude Vampire, the original French mix and an English dub, both presented in uncompressed Linear PCM 2.0. As with the picture quality, the audio often exhibits evidence of the film's low- budget origins. Overall, the sound is fairly tinny--though it stops short of being outright brash, thankfully--and dialogue, while still understandable, is frequently muddy or muffled. You'll also hear a light hiss running through many scenes, along with some audible pops and crackles and splices. I don't suspect much could've been done about any of this. It is what it is. But let's talk about the good--the film's creaky, clinking, skittering score, which jumbles atonal piano, saxophone freakouts, and eerie violin into a nightmare soundtrack. I love it, and it's a perfect fit for the movie's weird mood. The English dub also deserves a mention for being unexpectedly listenable. Didn't see that one coming!

The Nude Vampire Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Introduction by Jean Rollin (1080p, 2:04): Rollin, accompanied by a strange dude holding a white mask to his face, talks about how his goal for The Nude Vampire was to "make something mysterious."
• Jean Rollin Interview (1080p, 19:06): Daniel Gouyette, Jean Rollin's assistant between 1998 and 2003, videotaped many of their conversations over the years and edited them together into this 20-minute piece, which covers several topics, from Rollin's introduction to cinema and his love of surrealism, to the seduction of vampirism and his obsession with twins.
• Natalie Perrey Interview (1080p, 3:54): Frequent Rollin collaborator Natalie Perrey briefly talks about how she first met Rollin--she played a bit part in The Nude Vampire--and reminisces about the shooting experience.
• Original French Trailers (1080p): Includes the trailers for The Shiver of the Vampires (4:09), The Nude Vampire (3:41), The Iron Rose (3:42), Lips of Blood (2:20), and Fascination (2:33).
• English Trailer (1080p, 3:42)
• Booklet: All of the five films being released on the 24th include the same 20-page booklet, which features a great essay on Rollin and his films by Tim Lucas, the founder of Video Watchdog.

The Nude Vampire Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Unheralded horror filmmaker Jean Rollin is finally getting his high definition due, with five of his early films being released in wonderful Blu-ray editions by Kino-Lorber and Redemption Films. The Nude Vampire isn't my favorite of the five--it's the most amateurish and clunky--but you do see Rollin's fetishes and fascinations starting to congeal here, from the "sister" characters and wacko nipple jewelry to the varied takes on the vampire mythos. And let's be honest; any self-respecting gothic horror fan is going to want to own all of these films. Over the next few days we'll have reviews up for the rest of the series, so check back in, but there's no need to hesitate on pre-ordering the movies on Amazon if you're just waiting for a presentation analysis--they all look fantastic on Blu-ray. Recommended!